Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Checkpoint Killings. posted by Richard Seymour
Well, I suggested the other day that checkpoint killings were quite ordinary events in Iraq these days, and examples of this can still be found on the Iraq Body Count website. However, a huge number of these don't become bodies thanks to the hospitals. See this , for instance.Meanwhile, an AP report tells how:
Yarmouk Hospital - just one of several large medical facilities in Baghdad - receives several casualties a day from friendly fire shootings.But all glory be to the land of impunity, where a President may order epic crimes against other countries for no cost at all, yet has to face impeachment if he receives cock-sucking from anyone but his wife. (I imagine dear old Barbara Bush was much put upon.) For:
On Saturday, for example, US soldiers opened fire on a civilian vehicle in Baghdad, injuring a man and killing his wife.
[S]ome shootings - involving trigger-happy foreign security contractors - will never be investigated. Late last month, in Baghdad, unidentified foreigners in a convoy of three white four-wheel-drive vehicles opened fire on a small car that had come too close.Still, no one can beat the Whitehouse spokesman for spewing intestinal pie through a sanctimoniously pursed mouth, especially when it comes to suggestions that our boys, our boys, target civilians:
The woman driver was killed, her body left slumped in the front seat, splattered with blood and shards of glass. A male pedestrian was hit in the spine and paralysed. Those responsible are unlikely ever to be brought to book.
The White House rejected Ms Sgrena's claims. "I think it's absurd to make any such suggestion that our men and women in uniform deliberately targeted innocent civilians. "That's just absurd," said spokesman Scott McClellan.Well, what dumbass gave out an order that wasn't meant to be taken literally? Don't they know that irony is not a strong point among Americans, particularly those who join the army because they think it will put them through college?
However the Third Infantry Division, whose troops include those that fired on the Italians' car last Friday, came under investigation in April last year for opening fire on carloads of Iraqi women and children at checkpoints, according to US army documents obtained by the Guardian.
"The order was given to shoot anything that moves, but it wasn't meant to be taken literally," one soldier told the US army investigator.